The social contract of the welfare state can be strained by the arrival of immigrants who receive welfare payments financed by citizens' taxes. We show, however, that the presence of unemployed immigrants receiving welfare payments is consistent with social harmony. The social harmony, which is...

Migration networks are usually captured by the number of people from the migrant's country in the host region. Using Mexican migration data, we analyze the effects of the usual network variable and two additional origin-village-specific variables on migrants' location choice.

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers' union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

Economic policy is modeled as the outcome of a (political) game between two interest groups. The possible ex-post (realized) outcomes in the game correspond to the proposed policies. In the literature the policies fought for are exogenous. We extend such games by allowing the endogenous...